SC-CAMLR increasingly needs to make reference material available to the Commission for ongoing discussions over many years. Much reference material arising from Working Group discussions is placed into ‘Fishery Reports’ or the annual reports of the meetings. However, some reference material is preferred not to be in the public domain, therefore not in those reports. Other material may be provided by Members and needed for ongoing discussions over many years. In both cases, there is currently no suitable repository to enable ready access during deliberations of the Commission. By example, in 2014, the SC-CAMLR agreed to place MPA planning reference documents on the CCAMLR web site with Members Only access, but the place on the web site where this was to be achieved was not clear (SC-CAMLR-XXXIII, paragraphs 5.48). It is proposed that a ‘Reference Material’ section be placed under the ‘Science’ tab on the CCAMLR web site. The ‘Reference Material’ section would be for Members Only, only visible to Members logged in to the site. The Reference Material section would then have child pages representing major classes of reference material. At present, it can be foreseen that there are currently two main classes of reference material, but more could be erected as needed:
- Spatial Planning Domain reference material, and
- Data Layers.
A description and visualisation of the proposal is provided.